Speakers
Z Smith
Z Smith's background combines education and experience in physics, engineering, renewable energy, information technology, and architecture to bring a science-based approach to the problem of energy-efficient architecture and communtiy development. He received his bachelor's degree in Physics from MIT, his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, and began his career in the area of thin-film semiconductors for solar cell applications, where he authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications. He then worked in the application of these materials to new types of office products and the information technologies linking them at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, being named as inventor or co-inventor on 10 U.S. patents. He led the engineering team at Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive, which preserves snapshots of millions of websites over time through its "Wayback Machine." He assembled the first Home Energy Saver website while at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, a building energy modeling tool which is now visited by 750,000 households each year to analyze opportunities to use energy more efficiently.
His work as a building system consultant and project architect has focused bringing the methods of science to the intuitive and creative fields of architecture and the development of communities. Each building is an experiment about which predictions can be made (using simulation tools) and then tested by looking at actual performance of the building and the satisfaction of its occupants. Computer simulations of daylight and electric light, visual and thermal comfort, and overall energy use are used to inform design choices at every stage. But the smartest component in any building is the collection of people who inhabit it, and the next generation of high-performing buildings are instrumented, interactive learning systems, where the buildings learn from the occupants and the occupants learn from the buildings. Moving beyond buildings, his work increasingly takes each project as an opportunity to take advantage of and transform energy, water, and material flows to have a positive environmental impact while reinforcing community health.